Even with the relatively recent proliferation of email, instant messaging, and similar communication technologies, telephone services remain important to an average person or business. Indeed, it appears that the number of individual telephone lines in use is constantly increasing. The number and sophistication of feature functions available from both telephone systems and telephone service providers also continue to increase. Call answering, voice messaging, and automated attendant (“auto attendant”) are some of the more popular feature functions commonly offered by telephone systems and service providers.
An auto attendant system typically answers the incoming calls, greets the callers, and transfers the calls to selected extensions. Some auto attendant systems interact with the callers using, for example, dual tone multi-frequency (DTMF or touch-tone) key input. Other auto attendant systems accept voice input, which they process using automatic speech recognition capabilities. Still other systems can receive and process both DTMF and voice input. Representative auto attendant systems of all three types can support call screening. For example, an auto attendant system can identify the telephone number from which the call originated using caller ID information carried by the call, and display the number and a name associated with the number to the called person. The system can also request a caller to identify himself (or herself, as the case may be), record the caller's response, and play the response to the called person. In either case, the called person can accept the call, reject the call, or add the call to a telephone conference session.
Announcement of the new call can be made through the handset, headset, or loudspeaker of the telephone device used by the called person. This technique is convenient if the called person is engaged in an existing telephone conference session when the new call comes in. Privacy concerns, however, limit usefulness of such announcements if conferees other than the called person can hear the announcements. To prevent all conferees from hearing the announcements intended for one of the conferees, the connection of the called person-conferee to the telephone conference can be temporarily interrupted during the announcement. Unfortunately, this method of announcing new calls can disrupt the conference. The importance of the disruption varies, depending, for example, on the length of the announcement, and on whether the called person was speaking at the time of the disruption. Furthermore, the other conferees may be left with the impression that the called person has left the conference, and the called party can miss important conversation that takes place during the announcement. If the conference is being recorded, the disruptions may also interfere with the recording process.
It would be desirable to avoid such disruptions when making private informative audio announcements to a participant in a telephone conference. It would also be desirable not to create an impression that the participant receiving the announcement has left the conference during such announcements. It would further be desirable not to cause the participant receiving the announcement to miss the conference conversation that takes place during the announcement. Still further, it would be desirable to facilitate the process of recording the conference while enabling private notification of various conferees.